This was used by crooks to verify the
platform used by the victim, such as the desktop computer or mobile phone, and
direct them to a different path depending on their machine,“ Kasana said.
“Mobile users were redirected to affiliate pages that contain various offers,
while desktop users were asked to download a file from a folder containing the
malware. The file pretended to offer a collection of pornographic videos.The
malicious file was a downloader for the Facebook worm, which comes in the form
of a Chrome extension and additional binaries. The last part of the attack was
to spread among the victims' Facebook friends, by sending the lure message,“
Kasana added. The attack left users embarrassed. Many immediately called
friends and relatives to warn them not to click on the link or images as they
contained obscene material.
Speaking to
TOI, cyber expert Rakshit Tandon cautioned, “One should be extremely careful
and inspect any link, specially shortened URLs, before clicking on them.
Several thousands of Facebook accounts were subjected to the spam attack
globally via porn malware.“
To avoid
such attacks, Tandon suggested that one should immediately change his social network
account password and remove any unnecessary extensions from their web browser
by going into settingoptions.“Finally , every user should mark unknown links as
spam, so that Facebook can take it down automatically ,“ he added.
Source | Times of India | 11 June 2015
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